PATNA: An 18-year-old victim of gang rape in Bihar committed suicide on Thursday, a day before a scheduled meeting of the village panchayat to deal with the incident, was to take place.
Also, on the same day, a 35-year-old woman died in Patna after two men inserted iron rods into her private parts in a failed bid to rape her, police said on Thursday.
The parents of the 18-year-old Smruti Kumari (name changed), a student of intermediate at Sabaur College in Bhagalpur district, said she was gang-raped by a classmate of hers and one of his friends. She hung herself from the ceiling fan in her room on Wednesday night. She left behind a suicide note in which she named two youths who perpetrated the crime.
According to the police, Mrityunjay Kumar Yadav, who is a resident of Smruti’s village, and his friend Rahul Kumar forcibly took her to nearby Tilkamanjhi village on a bike when she was returning from college on Tuesday. They took her to a house in Sheeshmahal Hotel Lane and raped her several times, causing her to lose consciousness.
When she regained her senses, the two youths took her on the bike and dropped her outside her village, said a police official investigating the case.
Smruti’s family did not approach police due to pressure from the villagers against it. A meeting of the panchayat was scheduled to take place on Friday to decide the punishment for the two accused. But Smruti, who was emotionally devastated by the sexual assault, decided to end her life. “What you two have done with me has left me not fit to continue living,” she wrote in her suicide note.
“The two accused youths are absconding. We are trying to ascertain if there were any other men involved in the crime at the house at Tilkamanjhi,” said Sabur police station SHO Rajiv Kumar.
At Naubatpur in Patna district, two men tried to rape a 35-year-old married woman and, when she protested strongly, the duo hit her with a stick and shoved an iron rod into her private parts on Wednesday night.
She was rushed to Patna Medical College and Hospital in a critical condition and died there an hour after being admitted.
“The main accused, Dheeraj Paswan, has been arrested and the search is on for the other man. Dheeraj and the woman, a mother of four children, knew each other earlier,” said Prem Chauhan, the SHO of Naubatpur police station.